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On September 19, 2021, another eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano begins on the Canary Island of La Palma. For 85 days, the people of La Palma had to face an emergency situation in which the lava, gases and pyroclasts expelled by the new cone forced the eviction of 7,000 people, covered more than 1,200 hectares and destroyed almost 1,700 buildings, including more than 1,300 houses.

After the eruption ended on December 25, a reconstruction phase began and is still underway, reopening roads, restoring infrastructure and building new homes (dozens of residents are still living in rented accommodation, others are staying with relatives and some, the fewest, are still staying in hotels because they lost everything).

The City Council of El Paso and the School of Architecture of the University of Navarra have signed a collaboration agreement through which students and professors of ODS II will work, according to the dynamics established below, on projects for the National Volcanological Center (CVN) in the Cumbre Vieja area.

The program develops a building and landscape complex. The CVN will consist of spaces for research, outreach and a residence for scientists that will be tested as a housing prototype in case of emergency. Given the extension and location of the site, the complex will be accompanied by a landscape infrastructure that will serve to know, understand and enjoy the rich environmental heritage that La Palma offers by defining one or more observation points that can be linked to the Center, to trails and routes that start from it, or both.

The program, as can be intuited, is open to very different approaches that can go through the compactness or the disintegration in one or several buildings. And it is open to analysis and interpretation and experimentation, so that hybrid approaches, program transfers, etc. can be made between its different areas. The surfaces are indicative and could be optimized according to the project strategy.